TULCA 2020: Exhibition
The Law is a White Dog borrowed its title from a book by Colin Dayan, which explores how legal rituals have the power to "make and unmake" persons. Historically, certain categories of person have been invented mainly in order to confine or punish them—the slave, the criminal, the homosexual, the insane—and these categories are further entangled and haunted by classifications based on race. Conceived in the legal imagination in this way, these different classes of person are allocated unequal capacities for reason and for pain, and are distributed different rights to property—whether rights to own one’s own body, or to acquire land. In a west of Ireland context, Dayan’s text offers new ways to recognise persistent legal spectres and zones of exception in the landscape, and to consider the interaction of capital with the institutions of Church and State.
As a curatorial proposal, The Law is a White Dog invited artists to refute categorisation, and to invent new languages and forms of expression in order to develop affinities with others. Responses involve forms of memoir, analysis, mourning, fable, film and song. Again and again, an obstacle occurs: the problem of how sensing bodies, as sources of knowledge, conflict with legal and regulatory logics. How do we know the law, and how does the law know us?
A rescheduled exhibition ran from 9 - 18 December 2020 in An Post Gallery, Galway Arts Centre, 126 Artist-Run Gallery and Engage Art Studios.
An Post Gallery
Galway Arts Centre
126 Artist-Run Gallery
Engage Art Studios
